Thanks to everyone who turned up for Air Buccaneers this evening, it was a lighter-than-air riot. We’re going to do it again next Saturday at 7pm UK time, until we are defeated. More ruminations on this evening’s events below, along with some tips for anyone intending to come along at the weekend.
First up, thanks to Craig at PC Gamer UK for sorting out the server. Second up, if you haven’t played Air Buccaneers before and want to come along, please do have a read of the website and play the in-game tutorial. It’s not a hard game to get to grips with, but procedures like loading and firing the cannons, and the principles of flying the balloon, aren’t entirely obvious. To avoid early frustrating it’s worth familiarising yourself with the key concepts. Also remember to hit the spacebar if you fall, it’ll grapple you onto the balloon – ideal for mad boarding actions.
And then you can get involved in giantic balloon battles in beautifully bleak places. Like this:
I’d forgotten how ludicrously characterful the game is. The strange tale of abandoned tribes and mushroom gods, and a war fought via hot air-balloon. It’s filled with entertaining ideas: aerial mines that are fired by rocket, only to hang in the sky, waiting for a victim. Or the rocket propelled glider that takes you up the critical central “battleship” balloon, that is often the focus of any single battle.
The game itself is an interesting tension between slow-moving aircraft, and the fast paced melee/explosives combat. Watching people leap from one balloon to another, only to miss, grapple the underside of the ship, fight on deck, fall again, and up in a sword battle dangling from the bottom of an airship, really is quite something to behold. i was watching one battle where one of our pilots was fighting two enemies, hanging from the bottom of the ship on a grapple, as we bombarded the ship with cannons. He killed one, died, and then the battleship went down in flames. Heroic.
Not to mention plunging to your death is always amusing punctuation between the slow maneuvering of the balloons. The wind, it seems, is a jerk. Surviving a fall and getting back to the safety of your base without getting eaten by a mushroom is also a rather unique gaming experience. Anyway, if you’ve never played Air Buccaneers, and fancy a crack at some absurd sky piracy, join us on Saturday.
Huzzah!
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Best moment for me was when I managed to take out Senethro (who was on my team) with a cannonball in mid air as his glider took him between two battleships :D
Also, stealing a teeny tiny ship from the enemy and sneaking round behind them to bombard them is always good for a laugh – was impressed how quickly I got back into the rhythm of soloing a small balloon (or just a cannon) after playing this a lot back in the day. Fun times!
Yeah—if you’re a griefing bastard, you can down friendly hang-gliders quite easily with the defence musket. Great for LAN parties if someone’s been careless with gunpowder too many times. (Doing this online would probably just get you banned.)
Also, RPS guys: which Saturday are you calling “next”? 20th? 27th?
Hooray for teammates who stand there like idiots and spam airmines at short range instead of using the cannon!
You know who you are. You should also know that airmines launched by hand -break- when they hit balloons. :|
Meh. Tonight wasn’t quite so fun. Somehow good players from when this mod was alive got wind of activity and showed up. In a 5v5 there was 1 player on each team with >80score and 4 RPSers with negative scores.
Everyone was forced into soloing on the small boats because they’re fast, a small target and having the gun monkey AI bot makes it too easy to have the same rate of fire as a battleship.
Come to think of it, is there any way to turn the AI helper off to force you to load your cannon yourself? Would make soloing less practical.
Heh, the barrel buttmonkey. Just opt to load it yourself? If you have it down pat it’s faster to load and shoot by yourself, I think. It might be a server setting but I don’t know.
Makaveli is an old-timer, I remember him from years ago. I’ve never heard of the other guy though.
Oh, and there are guys from long ago who can solo with devastating efficiency – Makaveli is one of them I can assure you – and this was from pre-barrelguy days… removing barrelguy wouldn’t hinder him at all. Originally those barrels just gave you ammo, so… turning him off would probably make it harder for new players.
It might teach the new players how to load the cannon themselves as it was quite depressing to be helming a big ship with two players on the guns, each spamming fire/load commands at the bot such that he was usually stuck between the middle of them and missed half his load commands, meaning they were often firing empty barrels. All this while makaveli does scroll up-RMB-Scroll down-RMB while doing rings round you.
Was he even using the loader NPC? Considering his rate of fire, I think he was running back and forth manualy loading and firing to reduce the time it takes for the barrelmonkey. Or maby he did some combination? I dunno.
lmao , I want a monkey trained to load cannons!
I can make this if I completely forget sleep for a day… which I may do.
My group tends to play random old mods a lot, and I do hate it when those few hanger-on veterans show up and ruin the game for everyone just wanting to try something out.
I Used to love this game!! im so pleased people are giving it some respect. count me in on saturday!
@wedge
Yeah it’s a bit annoying for us but I can’t blame them for it either.
And I also think it would be better to remove the loader guy, seems like more fun to me.
I think the helper was meant to make it easier for newbies, but the problem is that they don’t realise there’s only 1 on a battleship and get reliant on him / don’t realise you can load things yourself (much faster with a bit of practice) – that’s how come I had the fastest reload award pretty much every round on Thursday (despite soloing), because I was doing it manually. The absolute fastest is for one of you to aim and another to load/fire it, but that only really works if 3 of you are in a small balloon (and aren’t under attack) or you’ve got loads of you on a battleship.
Human players can also load cannons better. Hold down the fire button while loading the cannonball and a progress bar appears, which IIRC grants extra range (maybe damage). You’ll stop automatically at maximum.
Unfortunately, loading cannons is not that fun.